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A Simple Favor

A Novel

Bookseller Recommendation

“A simple favor to watch her best friend Emily’s 5-year-old son for a few hours turns Stephanie’s world upside down. When Emily never returns home, the police assume she ran away. Then they start to question Emily’s husband and Stephanie as if they think they might have been involved. Stephanie and Sean are both keeping dark secrets. Then we hear Emily’s story and even more secrets are revealed. A Simple Favor is an eerie and chilling psychological thriller, compelling and intense with three main characters who we no longer believe - Gone Girl on steroids.”

Nancy McFarlane, Fiction Addiction

Soon to be a major motion picture from Lionsgate starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and Henry Golding, and directed by Paul Feig

A single mother's life is turned upside down when her best friend vanishes in this chilling debut thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like she and Emily. A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.

But Emily doesn’t come back. She doesn’t answer calls or return texts. Stephanie knows something is terribly wrong—Emily would never leave Nicky, no matter what the police say. Terrified, she reaches out to her blog readers for help. She also reaches out to Emily’s husband, the handsome, reticent Sean, offering emotional support. It’s the least she can do for her best friend. Then, she and Sean receive shocking news. Emily is dead. The nightmare of her disappearance is over.

Or is it? Because soon, Stephanie will begin to see that nothing—not friendship, love, or even an ordinary favor—is as simple as it seems.

A Simple Favor is a remarkable tale of psychological suspense—a clever and twisting free-fall of a ride filled with betrayals and reversals, twists and turns, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge. Darcey Bell masterfully ratchets up the tension in a taut, unsettling, and completely absorbing story that holds you in its grip until the final page.